Gungrave Preview

From Max Payne to Dante, dual-pistol-wielding heroes are becoming an increasingly common sight on the video game landscape. Sega and Red Entertainment add yet another with their upcoming third-person shooter Gungrave, which features a coffin-toting gothic cowboy named Grave who relies on his two trusty guns to do most of his dirty work. To help bring Naito Yasuhiro's (Trigun Maximum, Oh! My Goddess) characters to life, Red Entertainment has opted for the cel-shaded graphics technique, which gives the game a distinct anime look and feel.

Gungrave's story follows the basic revenge rubric, but with a few more over-the-top elements. Early on, you'll learn that Grave is in fact a walking corpse, so naturally he needs to have his blood changed periodically by an enormous machine supplied by a character known as Dr. T, who will give Grave some advice before he sets out on each mission. As you progress through the game, Grave will start to hunt down members of the syndicate, a large criminal organization led by the man responsible for Grave's death. The story continues to unfold through in-engine conversations with Dr. T and a girl named Mika (who brings Grave his clothing and weapons at the beginning of the game) and beautiful prerendered cutscenes that retain the general look of the game, albeit with much greater detail.

The gameplay mechanics in Gungrave are pretty straightforward. Since there isn't any ammunition in the game, Grave can simply stand in place and shoot repeatedly at enemies. If you hit a series of enemies multiple times in a row, you'll start to receive something called beats, which are used to charge up Grave's super meter located on the left side of the screen. When the meter is full, Grave busts out of his coffin and saturates the room with either bullets or missiles, depending on which super you have selected in the options screen. However, there are numerous situations (particularly boss battles) where super moves won't really do any damage, so instead, you can use the super meter to restore some of Grave's health. Occasionally, Grave can perform even more devastating super moves when the skull located in the super meter starts flashing. Whenever one of these moves is executed, the game cuts to a graveyard environment where Grave takes care of the enemy in dramatic fashion. You'll have access to only one super move at the beginning of the game, but you'll receive three more as you progress through some of the early levels.

Grave has a few other fancy moves at his disposal. Whenever there's a heated gunfight, you'll have to use some of Grave's jump-shoot combinations, which enable Grave to dodge and shoot at the same time. In addition, Grave's bullets actually seem to be stronger when he's performing a dive, making this ability especially useful against some of the tougher grunts in the game. It's also just really cool to see Grave dive backward down a staircase to dodge an enemy rocket.

There's no bullet-time effect here, so you won't have the luxury of being able to target multiple enemies as you fly through the air. In fact, the targeting system in the game seems like it could still use a little more work. You can target specific enemies by pressing the L1 button on the PlayStation 2 controller, but the enemy has to be directly in your line of sight and within a certain range. Moreover, the targeting system doesn't automatically track enemies, so if they happen to run offscreen, you'll have to turn around and retarget them.

That may sound simple enough, but Grave's walking speed is so incredibly slow that it can actually be quite a difficult task. Thankfully, Grave also has a move where he can perform a small hop to face the opposite direction, but even that can take some getting used to because there are many times when the camera is seemingly unable to keep up with the action onscreen. The camera also seems to have some problems when you're in tight quarters. For example, there's one level where Grave has to traverse up a series of staircases located in the sewers, but the camera is positioned in such a way that you can't see directly in front of Grave when he's about to emerge from the staircase, so you can't see if there are enemies waiting to ambush you. Hopefully, these problems will be fixed in the final version of the game.

There are about eight different environments in the current build of Gungrave, ranging from the city streets and an abandoned church located underground to an outrageously tall tower from which you can see the entire world below. For the most part, all of the levels in the game retain the cel-shaded look, but some look a little better than others. In addition, the draw distance in some of the later levels is ridiculously close, again raising the problem of not being able to see enemies that are about 15 feet away from you. The frame rate also tends to take a massive hit when there are about six to seven enemies onscreen at once, so there's somewhat of a pseudo-bullet-time effect.

There are a few extras available when you beat the game, including a movie mode, an option to turn on a slow-down effect (it's not quite bullet time) when Grave jumps, and a character mode where you can view character models inside of action figure packaging. The Japanese version of Gungrave comes out this week. The North American version is currently scheduled for release this fall. Look for more on both in the coming weeks.